Very Sparkly

I may skip Pick of the Issue till next Monday, if that doesn’t cause too much turbulence in your mental waters, but of course there were a few standouts last week, so I’ll probably come back and note them here. This week there’ll be scads of New Yorker Festival wrapups—look forward to challenging bouts of Guess Which Crowd This Was? and Match the Quotation in days to come.

Meanwhile, this was one of my favorite festival moments; as Lillian Ross, Robin Williams, and Barry Levinson practically skipped offstage after a preview screening of Man of the Year, Williams sang an homage to the Foley page scandal that was also a riff on the event’s being at the Alliance Française (he became a fast-talking, pompous French emcee several times, and about thirty other people), “Sank Heaven for Little Boys.” Giddy photo after the jump. Williams live was better than I’ve ever seen him on TV, and that means he was phenomenally good. Meanwhile, the movie itself brought up a few disturbing thoughts for me about the so-called liberal spirit of dissent, specifically in contrast to the Stephen Breyer event the day before. I’ll explain.

The blog’s now treading the territories of punctuation, publications, movies, design, and other things that stir me.

Over the years, I’ve worked with a brilliant brigade of culture writers, editors, and artists. You can read all about the people who've helped build Emdashes here at “Who We?” (That’s a New Yorker joke. Old habits die hard.)

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